Tales from the Eclipse
It wasn't meant to be life-changing. Or was it?
My Dallas-based podcast partner Sarah Hepola started talking about the eclipse last month, how she would be in the zone of totality; how everything was going to be different afterwards, and asking me on-air whether I’d ever seen a full eclipse, to which I replied:
“……”
I mean, I have seen partial eclipses, but I just never thought that much about them, or attached any meaning beyond a phenomena of the galaxies, which is cool enough.
That changed on Monday, when I saw, for the first time in my lifetime, New Yorkers coming together for a happy reason, the streets were packed, everyone looking up, everyone sharing glasses, which I did not have.
“Nancy!” said Chen, who owns the laundromat on the ground floor of my building, handing me a set of eclipse viewers, which I shared with my neighbor DJ’s Uber driver as we all talked with the bodega guys on the corner and the firemen next door.
Meanwhile, friend after friend sent photos of what they were experiencing, on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, outside of their midtown office, on New York’s Times Square.
This morning, I received a post from Tim Urban’s great “Wait But Why?” A generous clip:
As fortune would have it, the 2024 eclipse’s path of magical totality would be passing right over my new hometown of Austin, Texas. It was perfect.
Then came the weather reports. Austin was going to be cloudy on eclipse day.
Nope. Not okay. It wasn’t an option to not see this eclipse. My friend Liv Boeree was equally psychotic about this, so we decided on Sunday night that Monday morning we’d get on a flight to somewhere in the eclipse’s path that was forecast to have clear skies. We settled on Arkansas.
Early the next morning we flew to Little Rock where we were joined by our friend Peter, got in a car, and drove northwest to the dead center of the totality path, where the total eclipse would last for more than four minutes. We ended up in a big open rural field that may or may not have been part of someone’s farm. It was us and some cows. The sky was perfectly clear.
30 minutes until totality. I looked through my glasses at a crescent sun. It seemed a little dimmer out than usual, but only a little.
20 minutes. Thinner crescent, a tad dimmer, maybe a tad cooler than it was before?
10 minutes. Razor-thin crescent now, definitely weird lighting. Because all of the light is coming from one small area, shadows are very sharp. You can see the shadow of individual hairs on your head.
1 minute. It’s very dim, like early evening, but still feels like daytime generally. Waves of light and dark ripple across the ground, like the way light moves at the bottom of a swimming pool.
5 seconds. Diamond ring! I take off my glasses and the diamond ring looks strikingly beautiful and strange.
4, 3, 2, 1. The Earth’s dimmer switch suddenly goes downnnnn as dim daylight drops into night.
Totality…
The post, Tales From the Eclipse, gives a big and awesome picture, as does a photo of Urban’s friend taken immediately post-eclipse.
Tell us your eclipse story xx
As a friend who we dragged to Dallas for this experience expressed it, you can tell someone all the words, with all the excitement behind it, but until you actually experience the eclipse within the path of totality you will not understand how mind blowing it is.
Tim did a great job of capturing the experience ... partial eclipses are indeed very cool but totality was mind-blowing. You should almost think of it as an entirely different phenomenon from a partial eclipse.
Drove 7 hours on Sunday to get 3 minutes of it in Stowe, VT, and it somehow exceeded my unreasonably high expectations. Most amazing natural thing I've ever seen by an order of magnitude and now I can't wait to go somewhere else in my life to experience it again!